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Plant growth
Plant growth is a transmutation spell that causes plants to grow. Effect Plant growth has different effects depending on the version chosen. Notes Plant growth is a spell available to druids, as well as some clerics of nature deities and a few high-level rangers. It's able to cause either a small area of wilderness to become thick and overgrown, making movement difficult, or to enrich a larger area of cropland. The former use is more effective in an adventuring sense, to hinder enemies; the latter is of interest to landowners and farmers. How effective is plant growth in improving agriculture? First off, by the book numbers. Hiring a druid to cast the spell on your fields costs 150 gp per casting, and will affect everything within half a mile of the caster. Plants within this circle have their productivity and crop yields increased by a third. Now, a 1-mile diameter circle has an area of about 0.785 square miles, or just over 500 acres. That's a lot of land to enrich - in fact, if normal farming methods over those 500 acres yields an income of just 450 gp, casting the spell is probably worth it. Which leads of course to a few questions. First, does farming 500 acres generate more than 450 gp worth of income, normally? D&D 3E is singularly ill-equipped to handle this question - there's absolutely no hard and fast numbers on what a bushel of barley goes for in its Equipment section, or what kind of crop yields a Profession (Farmer) +4 skill gets you. Still, it's not unreasonable to expect that our hypothetical 500 acres of land have close to 90 people living on them - 90 people who would earn a silver piece a week each, 52 weeks per year, serving merely as untrained laborers rather than skilled farmers. So the area's crop yield probably comes to at least a value of 450 gp - and quite likely half again as much, or more. (Of course, real-world fields and farms don't neatly organize themselves into circular areas a mile in diameter. Some small areas of scrub or forest may lie within the spell effect, which leads to an interesting question all its own. A starting party of adventurers might just have to investigate Lone Hill Copse the summer after a druid comes through and blesses all the fields around it - and causes some small-scale plantlike monstrosity to awaken in the process...) In an ideal world, then, hiring a druid each year to cast plant growth on the local acreage is sound and foresighted. Next question: is it worth the risk? 150 gp is a fairly major investment for a farming village - more money than any single family will see in their lifetime. Foul weather, locust swarms, rampaging monsters, mad wizards playing with some new spell, or any of a dozen other calamities can ruin an enriched crop as surely as an unimproved one - and if a disaster happens, that 150 gp spent on hiring a druid is money that could otherwise have been used to repair the damage. Furthermore, who pays for the spell's casting? No single farm will be able to reap all the benefits from a casting of this spell - medieval farms simply don't cover that much territory. Villages of farmers might be able to pool their resources for the greater good, each family contributing a few gp in anticipation of getting increased yields on the fifteen or twenty acres they farm, but if just a few families hold out the whole business goes belly-up. (And the folks on the edge of the spell's area, who get a small crescent of acreage enhanced but not the rest of their fields, will be fussy. Imagine a village dispute over exactly where the visiting druid will stand when he casts his spell!) A feudal lord might pay for the casting out of pocket, raising taxes to cover the expense, but runs the risk of becoming very unpopular if the taxes become seen as more burdensome than the improvement in crops. This isn't a sure thing by any means. Final thoughts: Suppose all this is worked out, and ways are found to pay for crop enrichment and make sure the affected fields are successfully harvested. Suppose, also, that there are enough able and willing casters to regularly enrich a large portion of the region's cropland. What happens next? In the long term, two main effects are seen. First, the area fortunate enough to have found such a solution gets more people, since it can easily produce a third again as much food with the same amount of farmland. Some are new births from larger families (since famine is less common), others are immigrants. Much of this population growth moves to towns and cities - after all, our fortunate kingdom already has a sufficiency of farmers for the land it claims. Increased urbanization increases crafts and trade good production (as well as thievery and begging), increasing the area's overall wealth. More high-level characters may appear, notably mages and clerics with improved access to high-level spells. In short, if the virtuous cycle is strong enough, the area could see a fantasy magical version of the Industrial Revolution or the Renaissance. The second consequence is that the druids and nature priests who cast plant growth each year become absolutely vital to the continued health of the region. They control a full quarter of the area's food supply, with a few words murmured in the local farmyard the day before spring planting each year; should they be unable or unwilling to do their thing, a good chunk of the kingdom starts to starve. This is both a political opportunity and a huge responsibility - an organized guild of druids can get huge concessions through gentle threats, but if the crops ever fail they become an incredibly visible target for blame. What's worse, any neighbor who wants to harm our prosperous kingdom may begin by assassinating the spellcasters who bless the fields with plant growth, then sit back and wait for the civil disorder to start around harvest-time. Large-scale use of plant growth may be an incredible opportunity, but it's one that brings with it a great many problems. Category:Transmutation spells Category:3rd level druid spells Category:3rd level ranger spells Category:3rd level plant domain spells